The dish comes to the table topped with generous amounts of garlic and coriander, in a sauce of olive oil and clam juice, ripe for mopping with the slices of rustic bread in the basket. The scene before us couldn’t be brighter. I don’t mean the immense blue of the waters of Ria Formosa, but this fragrant plate of clams a Bulhão Pato in the foreground.
Although originally created in downtown Lisbon for 19th-century writer and gourmand Bulhão Pato, it’s in the Algarve that the dish really sings – the fabulously fresh local ingredients showing it off as, arguably, one of the finest recipes ever invented for seafood, even though it’s so simple: olive oil, garlic, white wine and coriander.
